Author: Mark Simpson

Mark Simpson won­ders what all those dot-matrix signs are try­ing to tell us

In an age when there are so many chan­nels to choose from and so many e-distractions to fid­get with, there is one sta­tion with a very cap­tive, very bored audi­ence. You can’t change chan­nels – or even turn it off. And you’d bet­ter pay atten­tion because oth­er­wise you might get a sum­mons in the post.

So, as you might ima­gine, the con­tent doesn’t exactly have to try too hard to get your attention.

If you drive on the UK’s trunk roads or motor­way net­work you will be, whether you want to be or not, a reg­u­lar viewer of Dotty TV – those help­ful mes­sages and pic­to­grams dis­played on those huge dot mat­rix screens sus­pen­ded over the car­riage­way on can­ti­levered posts seem­ingly every mile or so.

Officially installed to help man­age the road net­work by giv­ing drivers use­ful live traffic inform­a­tion, such as warn­ing of road clos­ures or acci­dents, and also warn of emer­gency speed restric­tions, they are most often used to dis­play unac­count­ably annoy­ing gen­eric ‘safety’ mes­sages such as

‘WATCHYOURSPEED’

Or

‘THINK! DON’T DRINKANDDRIVE’

I say ‘unac­count­ably annoy­ing’, but it’s pretty account­able, really. You’re driv­ing on the motor­way, you’re so bored you could even listen to Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. But Lo! You spy a large, expensive-looking flat screen TV panel in the dis­tance. How thought­ful and kind to install that for the bored driver! And it looks like it has a mes­sage on it! A mes­sage for YOU!!

Excited you approach this sign, this portent, won­der­ing what thrill­ing, stir­ring news it con­veys, what exotic augur­ies it betokens. But as it looms up, it slowly dawns on you that this is not LA Story – where Steve Martin is given rela­tion­ship advice by a chatty free­way traffic flow sign – but instead pat­ron­ising, use­less, and slightly snotty ‘safety advice’.

‘KEEPYOURDISTANCE’

Dotty TV is like those 1970s pub­lic inform­a­tion films, but without the charm­ing anim­a­tion, the catch­phrases or the cats.

After a hun­dred miles or so, or even just fif­teen, these nan­nyish exhorta­tions from on high begin to feel like reg­u­lar, smart­ing slaps across the wrists by a Highways Agency ruler.

You begin to think dark, crazy, and rather child­ish thoughts such as: Why SHOULD I keep my dis­tance? Or watch my speed? Or take a break? Who can I phone RIGHTNOW and talk to in a very anim­ated fash­ion while my fuel runs out? And where did I stow that bottle of vodka?

Part of the irrit­a­tion is of course the real­isa­tion that because you’re read­ing these signs you’re almost cer­tainly not the kind of per­son these Maoist exhorta­tions are inten­ded for. You’re being taunted with remind­ers of the care­free fun that other more dec­ad­ent drivers are hav­ing on the road – while you con­scien­tiously read these bloody messages.

Some are just an insult to reason. For instance, the message:

‘TAKEEXTRACAREWHENTOWING’

I don’t think I’ve ever towed any­thing in my life, and I sin­cerely hope I never do any­thing so vul­gar. But I have a hunch that if someone who is in fact tow­ing some­thing needs to be reminded they are tow­ing some­thing then they prob­ably aren’t going to take much care at all – let alone extra care. Or read stu­pid signs.

But come the Bank Holiday week­end I have to read that mes­sage a zil­lion times before I have an over­priced Americano in a Welcome Break.

A YouGov sur­vey a few years ago for motors.co.uk found that 43% of drivers ignore dot mat­rix signs. Another 4% claimed never to have seen one, ever. Clearly these people are much, much more sens­ible than me.

The philo­soph­ical prob­lem with ‘safety mes­sages’ is not only that the wrong people read them, it’s that in the con­text they’re presen­ted, the infin­ite bore­dom of the lim­inal space of motor­way driv­ing – and on such huge, expens­ive, portent­ous signs placed, from the per­spect­ive of the driver, lit­er­ally in the heav­ens – they are no longer safety mes­sages. They are bur­eau­cratic for­tune cookie slo­gans exal­ted into life-changing max­ims. You end up think­ing about them far, far too much before some­thing more inter­est­ing hap­pens, such as pick­ing your nose.

A little research reveals that the signs I’m moan­ing about aren’t dot mat­rix signs at all. They are actu­ally called Variable Message Signs, or VMS, and began to be intro­duced to the UK about fif­teen years ago. There are now c. 3000 of them along our trunk roads and motor­ways wag­ging their digital fin­gers at us.

The very latest VMS is the ‘MS4’, which the man­u­fac­turer describes as ‘offer­ing a full graph­ics area with a mat­rix of LEDs in two col­ours. This makes it cap­able of dis­play­ing an almost infin­ite range of pic­to­grams and legends.’

Shame that those infin­ite cap­ab­il­it­ies are mostly used to tell you

‘TIREDNESSKILLS’.

Even when a VMS dis­plays poten­tially use­ful inform­a­tion such as road clos­ures ahead, it sud­denly becomes all tongue-tied and tacit­urn, after all those miles and miles of point­less advice. They all too fre­quently just say: ‘A1CLOSEDJCN 21–23’ without giv­ing any more identi­fy­ing info, des­pite acres of unused dis­play room.

Even before the infin­ite cap­ab­il­it­ies of VMS, most people didn’t know their junc­tion num­bers, espe­cially if the road isn’t a motor­way. They tend, nat­ur­ally enough, to go by place names, or inter­sect­ing road num­bers. I’m con­vinced it’s a delib­er­ate wind-up. You find your­self sud­denly shout­ing some­thing at the Dotty TV you never, ever thought you’d hear your­self say:

The appear­ance of Channing Tatum and his Magic Mike XXL bun-chums Matt Bomer and Adam Rodriguez on a float at LA Pride shak­ing their money-makers for the highly appre­ci­at­ive LGBT crowd seems to have marked a water­shed moment in the City of Signs.

Not long after Tatum’s float dis­ap­peared into the heat haze of Santa Monica Boulevard the Hollywood Reporter ran a piece by Merle Ginsberg, formerly of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, about the way straight male per­formers like Tatum have gone ‘bey­ond met­ro­sexu­al­ity’ (char­ac­ter­ised by the HR as ‘indul­ging in feminine-seeming ped­i­cures and hair products’) and now want to be read as ‘gayish’.

Ginsberg argued that far from being frightened of gay atten­tion and gay ‘taint’ as in days of yore, straight men these days act­ively – or is it pass­ively? – seek out, tickle and tease the male gayze on Pride floats and Out magazine cov­ers, and by talk­ing about which other male actor they’d do if they did guys. The piece also looked at how this phe­nomenon of furi­ously flirty ‘straight homos’ – or ‘stromos’ as it was dubbed – is blur­ring the lines of sexu­al­ity and jam­ming gaydar.

Obviously this is a sub­ject right up my pro­cliv­ity. And sure enough I found myself quoted in the piece – but couldn’t quite remem­ber when I’d given them. I searched my Inbox and found that I’d answered ques­tions from Ginsberg about this phe­nomenon of straight male ‘gay­ness’ by email back in 2013. I guess even two years ago I’m still so now.

However the Hollywood Reporter piece seems to have ruffled a few gay feath­ers eli­cit­ing com­plaints about ‘gay ste­reo­types’ and ‘exploit­a­tion’. While it’s not really for me to defend the word ‘stromo’ – I’ve enough annoy­ing neo­lo­gisms of my own to look out for – the phe­nomenon that the art­icle is about is def­in­itely worth ana­tom­ising and cer­tainly not ‘made up’ as some claim, offen­ded ostrich-like.

You prob­ably won’t be sur­prised to hear that I think the only prob­lem with the Hollywood Reporter piece was that I wasn’t quoted enough — par­tic­u­larly since the art­icle strives to delin­eate a dif­fer­ence between ‘stromos’ and ‘met­ro­sexu­als’ which seems to be based more on an American mar­ket­ing defin­i­tion of met­ro­sexu­al­ity than mine.

So here are the answers metrodaddy gave in full. (Note the bit towards the end where I say the increas­ing inco­her­ence of what we mean by ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ is troub­ling for tra­di­tion­al­ists – straight and gay.)

MS: I agree that met­ro­sexu­al­ity has morphed – though I would say it has always been morph­ing and that really it’s intens­i­fied. Metrosexuality was never about facials and flip flops it was about the male desire to be desired – which is rampant nowadays. Today’s men are totally tarty. And shame­less hussies with it. Male self-objectification is very much the name of today’s game.

Funnily enough, I think this presents a prob­lem for male celebs in gen­eral and movie act­ors in par­tic­u­lar. Now that the young str8 male movie-going audi­ence are so image con­scious and so keen to attract the eye, the man on the screen has to go the extra mile – and get up even earlier for even longer, harder workouts. Likewise as their audi­ence becomes ‘gayer’, they have to become even gayer or else end up look­ing Dad-ish. They have to push the envel­ope fur­ther and try harder than their male fans, or the boy­friends of their female fans, or else why should they be in the spotlight?

MG: What do you think of these actors/singers (Adam Levine) who look and dress and even move in a rather gay way? Is this the new masculinity?

Adam Levine looks and sounds like a singing David Beckham. With a bit of Marc Jacobs thrown in. But then Beckham is a kind of non-singing pop star.

What’s hap­pen­ing is that a kind of male bi-sensuality is becom­ing more and more the norm, both with young men and par­tic­u­larly with male per­formers, appro­pri­at­ing tastes and man­ners sens­ib­il­it­ies and sens­it­iv­it­ies that were pre­vi­ously pre­served for women and gay men – on pain of emas­cu­la­tion and ridicule.

Men increas­ingly want to present them­selves as avail­able for any fantasy, and respons­ive to both sexes – even and espe­cially when they’re het­ero­sexual. It’s a use­ful strategy for a ‘civil­ian’ in today’s medi­at­ised, mirrored world, but it’s an essen­tial one if you’re a performer.

Is this pos­sibly due to a fur­ther accept­ance of gay cul­ture in gen­eral? How did that hap­pen over time?

It’s partly due to a greater accept­ance of gay cul­ture. If homo­pho­bia is uncool, as it is for most young people in the US or UK today, then fear of ‘gay’ things also, even­tu­ally, becomes uncool.

But I would almost put it the other way around, homo­pho­bia has declined because today’s men are less afraid of them­selves than they used to be. Today’s straight men enjoy most of the same sexual prac­tises as gay men, though usu­ally with someone with a vagina, and have embraced gay men’s love of the male body too – though usu­ally their own body. Likewise, male passiv­ity is much less of a taboo than it was. The itchy throb of the pro­state gland is no respecter of sexual orientation.

Why would a gay magazine put a straight guy on the cover? Why would a straight guy do it?

Gay magazines put straight men on the cover because a) Their read­ers, how­ever much they may deny it some­times, really like to look at hot straight guys, and b) it gets them press: ‘You’ll never guess who’s in his pants on the cover of OUT magazine this month!!’. A gay guy on the cover of a gay magazine is not news. Of course, straight guys on the cover of gay magazines is hardly news any­more now that they’re all scratch­ing each other’s eyes out to get there.… Another reason why gay magazines do it is because it helps to make homo­pho­bia even un-cooler.

Why do straight celebs and sports­men do it? Because: a) They get pub­li­city, and b) They get kudos, and c), prob­ably the most import­ant, straight men nowadays love to be ‘gay icons’.

There is money and career points in hav­ing a ‘gay fol­low­ing’, to be sure, but I think the need for gay male approval goes deeper and is shared by a lot of young straight men today. It’s that desire to be desired thing again. Straight men ache to be sex objects – and what bet­ter way to be objec­ti­fied than by other men? Straight men know how demand­ing men’s eyes can be. How pen­et­rat­ing their ‘gaze’ is.

Even if you have no desire to ever have sex with another guy there’s noth­ing quite so sym­bol­ic­ally, deli­ciously ‘pass­ive’ as being oggled by other pen­ised human beings.

Is it con­fus­ing that we can’t tell who’s straight or who’s gay any­more? Is this a good thing?

It is very con­fus­ing. But con­fu­sion can be a good and lib­er­at­ing thing.

I think we’ve reached a point where straight men are so ‘gay’ nowadays that they’ve actu­ally become ‘straight act­ing’. Those beards that gays star­ted wear­ing back in the early Noughties to butch up have been adop­ted whole­sale by a lot of straight guys in the last few years, and for sim­ilar reas­ons. The dec­or­at­ive, imit­at­ive mach­ismo of the gay world has become the ‘real’ thing.

Likewise, the pleas­ur­ing and pleas­ured pneu­matic porno male body that Tom of Finland was dood­ling from his over­heated ima­gin­a­tion back in the 50s and 60s has become the dom­in­ant main­stream fantasy. The Situation and his real­ity TV ‘bros’ have Tom-ish bod­ies that invite and plead for the gayze.

But of course the big­ger pic­ture is that what we mean by ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ is really break­ing down into inco­her­ence. Which is troub­ling for both straight and gay tra­di­tion­al­ists. While you might think that gay men would all wel­come this glor­i­ous con­fu­sion some do find it very dis­con­cert­ing. And no one likes to be upstaged.

But in the end, the total tri­umph of met­ro­sexu­al­ity and male tarti­ness, ter­ri­fy­ing as it is, should prob­ably be seen as a lib­er­a­tion for straight men – and a bloody relief for gay men. After all, they no longer have to embody all the van­ity and tarti­ness of their entire sex just to keep straight men ‘normal’.

Mark Simpson on his hate-love affair with his dinky Japanese sports car

I hate my car. I hate the way I’m blinded by other cars’ head­lights. I hate the way all the dirt and water on the road ends up cov­er­ing it, turn­ing it into a sub­mar­ine on motor­ways. I hate the way I can’t see past pretty much any other vehicle I’m behind, or along­side. Or in front of.

I hate the way I have to be so care­ful with the bottles in my super­mar­ket shop­ping because the cramped boot is not very deep and the lid is ter­ribly thin. I hate that it isn’t very fast, except on round­abouts. I hate get­ting in and out of it in a kind of half limbo dance that will undoubtedly res­ult in an early hip replace­ment op. I hate how noisy and exhaust­ing it is over long dis­tances – you always arrive feel­ing you’ve driven twice as far as you actu­ally have.

And most of all, I hate the way I can’t have sex in it because there’s only two seats and they’re buckets.

But I love my car enough to put up with all of this moany aggrav­a­tion and more. Because my car is itself pure sex. You see, my car is an MX-5. If you already have one you will know exactly what I mean and slap me on the back. If you don’t, you will prob­ably be covered in bit­ter­ness and envy.

Yes, you may scoff and say love is blind even if it’s nifty with a pair of scis­sors, but Mazda’s fam­ous ‘hairdresser’ road­ster, launched way back in 1989 and made in Hiroshima, Japan, is the best-selling two-seat con­vert­ible in his­tory. There are now nearly a mil­lion sat­is­fied cus­tom­ers wear­ing a smile that can only be called post-coital.

‘Nothing on the road will give you bet­ter value. Nothing will give you so much fun. The only reason I’m giv­ing it five stars is because I can’t give it fourteen.’

So what do I love about my Mk 2.5 MX-5 exactly? I could talk about its respons­ive­ness, about how its light­ness and approx­im­ate 50/50 weight bal­ance means it has nearly neut­ral hand­ling. How rufty-tufty bends just see it com­ing, sigh, and sur­render. How it is a car which con­nects you, sen­su­ally, to the road in the way no other car I’ve driven does. (Though this is also why it can be exhaust­ing – all that fun and frol­ick­ing wears you down in middle age.)

Or I could talk about how it is the uncanny dis­til­la­tion of great British and Italian sports road­sters of the 1960s, such as the Triumph Spitfire, MGMGB, Alfa Romeo Spider and Lotus Élan. But with an engine that actu­ally starts.

But really, if there’s one thing I can boil my MX-5 love down to it would be this: a cloth hood you can open and close with one arm while still seated. The MX-5 is a con­vert­ible per­fectly suited to squeez­ing out the max­imum expos­ure to day­light and fresh air in the vagar­ies of the UK climate.

The MX5 is only really, orgas­mic­ally, gig­gly fun to drive with the top down. This is after all what it was designed to do – to scoop up the sky and suck in the 360 degree speed­ing land­scape while sur­ging around corners. Even revers­ing is a thrill in the MX5: you turn around in your seat and you can see right over the flat rear, as if it were a 1950s Italian speedboat.

Driving the MX 5 top down in the UK is a bliss­ful, illi­cit, almost kinky joy which you know is ulti­mately doomed to be cut short. Which is why I always dis­trust people who have an MX-5 as their second car, one which they only really use in the sum­mer at week­ends. I’m sorry but you have to suf­fer in it the rest of the year to earn and deserve the intense pleas­ure it gives you on those gold dust sunny days. Sorry, day.

And Mazda seem to agree with me about what really makes an MX5.

After going ser­i­ously astray with the 2005 Mk3 or NC ver­sion, which was too big, too heavy, over-powered, too quiet, and too com­fort­able – and most blas­phem­ous of all offered a coupe ver­sion with a powered retract­able hard top – they have just launched a Mk4 or ND ver­sion which is a return to the MX-5’s Mk1 roots. Smaller, slim­mer, shorter in fact than any MX5 before. It’s proper dinky.

This makes it even more respons­ive and pleas­ur­able to drive, accord­ing to early reviews. But much more import­antly, this means that the cloth hood is also smal­ler and even easier to raise or lower one-handed.

Mark Simpson nav­ig­ates around the nos­tal­gia and the facts about drivers and maps

I recently bit the bul­let and had a clear-out in my rather cramped car. I freed up a sur­pris­ing amount of space by get­ting rid of the yel­low­ing, dog-eared maps clut­ter­ing it up with their obsol­es­cence. Including a street atlas of North Yorks where I live, sev­eral city maps col­lec­ted over the years (when am I likely to visit Plymouth again?) and a 2003 AA road atlas of Britain.

OK, I left one garage-bought UK road atlas in the boot of my car. But I’m not sure why, except per­haps to absorb spillages from my weekly super­mar­ket shop. I hon­estly can’t remem­ber the last time I looked at it. Certainly no more recently than any of the other maps I removed. Call it a large-scale, absorb­ent safety blanket.

I was a little bit sad, as I felt as if I was los­ing a part of my past and indeed of my mas­culin­ity. I grew up in a world where maps were some­thing that, if you were a chap, you con­sul­ted often with a com­pet­ent frown, pre­tend­ing to under­stand them as nat­ur­ally and com­pletely as DIY and the off­side rule – while wear­ing a square chin and a chunky wrist­watch, like Richard Todd plan­ning a dar­ing raid on the Mohne dam.

Certainly you would much rather con­sult a map, even one with pages stuck together with sour milk, than ever ask for dir­ec­tions. Directions could be wrong, and were any­way likely to be too com­plic­ated to remem­ber – no mat­ter how many times the over-helpful ped­es­trian repeated them to you while you sat there, smil­ing, nod­ding and bit­terly regret­ting your mistake.

Most of all, ask­ing for them was an open and pub­lic admis­sion that you had failed as a man.

But now of course no one needs to ask for dir­ec­tions, because we have a gad­get in our car that will tell us where to go auto­mat­ic­ally and dis­creetly. And because it’s a gad­get and gad­gets are manly it’s OK to be told what to do by it. Even if it strands you in a raging ford or wedges you in a charm­ingly nar­row street.

After a dec­ade or so of wide­spread sat­nav use, and par­tic­u­larly the integ­ra­tion of sat­navs into smart­phones, map read­ing so twen­ti­eth cen­tury. It’s a lost art. Several recent sur­veys have sug­ges­ted that most UK drivers are so reli­ant on sat­navs they don’t know how to read a map any more.

A 2014 sur­vey of 1150 road users by Flexed.co.uk found that 77% of people who use a sat­nav admit they rely on it totally on a jour­ney – with an alarm­ing 63% of drivers not even both­er­ing with road signs when using sat­nav, let alone maps.

60% admit­ted they can’t even read a paper map, and only 9% said they research the route before tak­ing an unfa­mil­iar jour­ney. Often they have no idea of the route they’ve taken to reach their des­tin­a­tion, while listen­ing to Adele really loudly.

Another sur­vey of 2000 road users by Telenav GmbH (to pro­mote their off­line sat­nav Scout) pub­lished at the end of 2014 echoed these find­ings with 57% of all ages admit­ting they couldn’t read a map com­fort­ably. But they also found that a whop­ping 85% of 18–24 year olds say they can’t read a map.

Certainly, like middle-aged me, most of these digital kids can’t be bothered to reach for a map, find the right page, find where they are on the page, find where they’re going to, decode the sym­bols and col­ours and nav­ig­ate the best route between.…

Sorry, I lost the thread there – I was so bored just typ­ing that last sen­tence I had to go and check my Facebook and Twitter feed and play Angry Birds.

Perhaps most alarm­ing of all, the same sur­vey dis­covered that half of drivers don’t even wear wrist­watches (you can determ­ine North with one). The Dambusters spirit is truly dead.

These sur­veys usu­ally prompt anxious head­lines and edit­or­ial soul-searching about the loss of map-reading skills by a gen­er­a­tion, and sug­ges­tions that map-reading should be included in driv­ing tests. Obviously ‘map read­ing’ is some kind of code for ‘moral compass’.

Perhaps because they were slightly afraid of being told off for being slack, 63% of drivers assured the AA they had used a prin­ted map in the last six months, com­pared to 60% who had used sat­navs, while just over 35% of drivers said they used both sat­nav and an atlas to plan a route (com­pared to 9% from the Flexed sur­vey). Only 17% admit­ted they relied solely on sat­nav (com­pared to 77%)

When it came to those lazy, lost 18–24 year olds the AA offered hope, find­ing that only 43% said they depended on their sat­navs alone to nego­ti­ate the nation’s roads – about half the fig­ure from the sur­veys a year later, and under that psy­cho­lo­gic­ally import­ant 50% figure.

Now, far be it for me to sug­gest that the AA is wor­ried about fall­ing sales of its fam­ous road atlases, but frankly, any recent sur­vey that claims to have found that more UK drivers use prin­ted maps than sat­navs is clearly com­pletely lost.

Even more so than 67-year-old Sabrine Moreau who in 2013 took a 1,800 mile detour through six coun­tries after her sat­nav mal­func­tioned. She was aim­ing for Brussels from her home in Soire-sur-Sambre to pick up a friend from the train sta­tion but even­tu­ally ended up in Zagreb, Croatia.

And I think we’ve all been there, one way or another.

We all laugh at the stu­pid­ity or credu­lity of zom­bie drivers auto­mat­ic­ally fol­low­ing sat­nav instruc­tions because they remind us uneas­ily of ourselves, but the real­ity is that most of the time Google and Garmin read maps much bet­ter than most drivers, male or female. Who, in the glor­i­ous pre-satnav past, would often be try­ing to read them on their laps while driv­ing.

It’s time to face car­to­graphic facts and not be dis­trac­ted by the, er, legend. Printed maps are now pretty much as obsol­ete as driv­ing gloves, hand-cranks and Richard Todd’s pipe. And that’s not such a bad thing.

“The Magic Mike movies are, truth be told, a bit of a nos­tal­gia trip. ‘Male strip­ping’ is actu­ally rather retro. It emerged as a phe­nomenon in the now impossibly innocent-looking 90s when the Chippendales and their orange muscles framed by bow ties, white cuffs and permed hair drove women wild – and Channing Tatum him­self was work­ing as a strip­per in Florida, before he became a Hollywood sex object.”

Yours mus­ing on today’s stripped-down stuffed-crotch mas­culin­ity in The Telegraph.